Capability catalogue · v1 · August 2026
Every capability worth knowing about for a salon — and for the barbers, nail bars, brow studios, massage rooms, physios, groomers and tattoo shops that run on the same four primitives: staff, services, money up front, and a reason to come back. Tiered by build order, not by how impressive it sounds in a pitch. Mexico is the first install; Australia is the market.
No client notices these when they work. Every one of them generates a complaint when it doesn't. This is the whole of version one for Mum's salon — resist the pull of Tier 3 until all seven are boring.
Per-staff calendars, per-service duration, buffer and clean-down time, and hard double-booking prevention. This is the engine everything else plugs into — get the data model right here or pay for it in every tier above.
Every service with a name, duration and price, held as structured data — not typed into
a page. It feeds the booking flow, the website, LocalBusiness schema, and
Google's booking surface from one source.
Confirmation on booking → reminder at 24 hours → a confirm-or-reschedule tap at 2 hours. The single highest-return automation in the catalogue: reminder ladders of this shape are reported to cut no-shows 25–40%.
MX WhatsApp Cloud API utility templates — where the client already lives
AU SMS + email; WhatsApp penetration is low, don't force it
Contact, visit history, spend, preferred stylist, notes, and — critically — recorded consent state for each message channel. This table is the asset. It is also the thing you can never get back if you rent it from Fresha.
A one-tap link in every reminder, governed by a stated policy window. Removes the most common interruption in the salon's day and converts silent no-shows into fillable gaps while there's still time to fill them.
Near-everyone books from a phone, often standing in a queue. Fast first paint, thumb-reachable booking, no layout shift. Installable as a home-screen app if you want it, but that's a nice-to-have and not a reason to delay.
Most local discovery ends on the Maps listing, not the website. Correct category, hours, services, photos, and a booking link — the cheapest acquisition work available, and a prerequisite for the Google review and reservation features later.
Each of these has a number attached to it. That matters more for the Australian pitch than for Mum's salon: an owner paying A$230/month for Timely wants to know what they get back, and "a nicer website" is not an answer.
Take a deposit at booking, or hold a card against a cancellation policy. The strongest lever on no-shows there is — reported to remove around 90% of first-time-client no-shows, with businesses using deposits seeing roughly a 32% lift in appointments that actually happen.
MX Mercado Pago — Checkout Pro for speed, Checkout API when you want the flow to stay on your own page
AU Stripe (best API, native Xero sync) or Square (free reader, owns Afterpay)
Checkout prompts the next appointment at the interval that service implies — six weeks for colour, four for a cut. Then a follow-up message for anyone who left without booking. Card-on-file clients already rebook about 10% more often; the prompt compounds it.
A cancelled 2pm Saturday is pure lost revenue — the chair, the stylist's hour, both gone. When a slot opens, offer it automatically to waitlisted clients who match the service and stylist, first to accept takes it. Quiet, unglamorous, and the feature owners react to hardest in a demo.
Flag clients who've passed 1.5× their own normal gap and send something worth opening. Requires the visit history from T0 and — non-negotiably — recorded marketing consent, because this is promotional traffic, not service traffic.
A Book Now button on the Maps listing itself, booking straight into your calendar. Google announced agentic booking at I/O 2026, rolling out to US users over the summer — which makes a machine-readable service catalogue a distribution asset, not just tidiness.
Six blow-dries paid up front, or a monthly membership. Converts lumpy walk-in revenue into something predictable and raises switching cost more than any loyalty scheme. Needs careful ledger design — balances, expiry, refunds — so treat it as real financial code.
Cash today for a service delivered later, bought by someone who isn't your client and redeemed by someone who might become one. Seasonal, and disproportionately valuable in the weeks before Christmas and Mother's Day.
The shampoo used in the chair, offered at checkout and reorderable by message six weeks later. Highest-margin revenue in a salon and the one most consistently left on the table.
Clients judge Tier 0 and 1. Owners buy Tier 2. Every hour an owner spends on a spreadsheet at 9pm is the thing you're really selling against — and it's the tier where generic website builders have nothing to offer at all.
Revenue per stylist, rebooking rate, retention, service mix, chair utilisation, average ticket. Most owners have never seen these numbers because their current tool buries them. Showing an owner their own retention rate is the strongest demo moment you have.
Service and retail commission calculated as the sale happens, tips allocated, both visible to the stylist in real time. Removes the fortnightly payroll argument, which is a recurring source of friction in every commission salon.
Product consumed in the chair and product sold off the shelf are different economics and should be different ledgers. Deduct backbar automatically per service performed, alert on reorder thresholds, and the owner stops discovering shortages mid-appointment.
Colour formulas with developer volume and timing, allergies and patch-test dates, photo-use consent, the preferences that make a returning client feel known. This is the vertical depth a generic scheduler can't copy — and the reason a stylist won't leave.
Who's on, when, and what that does to bookable availability — one source, not a printed sheet plus a booking system that disagrees with it. Handles leave, split shifts, and the chair-renter who sets their own hours.
A stylist opens their phone and sees today's clients, each one's history and formula, and their own earnings so far. Adoption by staff is what makes or breaks a salon system — the owner can buy it, but the team decides whether it gets used.
Takings by method, tips, discounts, voids, cash variance — closed off in two minutes instead of twenty. Unglamorous, done daily, and therefore worth more than most Tier 3 features combined.
Sales, fees, refunds and payouts landing in the accounting package without re-keying. In Australia this is a real differentiator, because the incumbents are uneven about it.
AU Stripe syncs natively to Xero. Square covers Xero and QuickBooks but not MYOB. Tyro terminals reconcile cleanly to both.
Photos attached to the client record and the formula that produced them. Consent is a stored flag per photo, not an assumption — it decides whether an image can be reused in marketing, and getting that wrong is a real problem, not a small one.
These win meetings. Most are also thin wrappers over someone else's API, which means they're cheap for you to add and cheap for a competitor to copy. Build them because they close deals, not because they're the moat — the moat is Tier 2.
Answers after hours and during the rush, books straight into the calendar, escalates what it can't handle. Salons lose real bookings to unanswered calls — the stylist's hands are literally in someone's hair. Market pricing sits at roughly US$29–199/month.
Any unanswered call triggers an immediate message offering a booking link. A fraction of the effort of a voice agent and recovers a surprising share of the same lost bookings — build this first and treat the voice agent as the upsell.
The client never leaves the conversation they were already in. Genuinely transformative in Mexico, where the salon's whole relationship already lives in WhatsApp. In Australia, largely beside the point.
MX Ship it — this is how her clients already talk to her
AU Skip; build the same flow over SMS if anything
Client uploads a photo and previews a colour or cut before committing. Sells consultations and reduces the "that's not what I asked for" conversation. Perfect Corp ships this as a drop-in web module, mobile SDK, or REST API.
Ask for the review at the right moment — just after a good appointment — then draft the reply for the owner to approve. Run it in approval mode, not autopilot; Google's local ranking weights review volume, recency and rating heavily enough to be worth the discipline.
Don't mark up review schema that contradicts the live Google rating — mismatched signals confuse rather than average.
A pass added to Apple or Google Wallet from a QR code at the desk — no app download, no account creation. Points and rewards update silently in the wallet, and the pass can surface a notification near the salon.
Consented before/after pairs become drafted posts with the service and price attached. The owner approves from their phone between clients. Solves the real problem, which was never ideas — it was finding fifteen minutes.
Not for the salon — for the agency, once there are ten salons. Twenty is the
open-source Salesforce alternative worth watching: AGPL-3.0, ~54k stars, YC-backed, TypeScript,
Docker Compose to self-host. Pair with n8n (free community edition, ~€15–30/mo of
server) as the glue between client systems.
Keep this separate from the salon's client database. They're different jobs — conflating them is the classic mistake.
The single architectural decision that decides whether this is reusable: nothing above
the interface knows which country it's in. Business logic calls send(client,
template, vars) and charge(client, amount, intent). Which provider answers
is configuration.
| Layer | Mexico — today | Australia — later | Interface owns |
|---|---|---|---|
| Messaging | WhatsApp Cloud API | SMS + email | Template category, consent check, delivery receipts, quiet hours |
| Payments | Mercado Pago Checkout Pro / API |
Stripe or Square | Deposit intent, card-on-file token, refund, settlement webhook |
| In-person | Mercado Pago point | Square reader / Tyro EFTPOS | Terminal pairing, sale, void |
| Accounting | Local export | Xero, MYOB | Canonical sales journal — never provider-shaped |
| Tax / invoicing | Country plugin | Country plugin | Nothing. Keep this out of core entirely. |
Message economics shape the design
WhatsApp moved to per-delivered-message billing in July 2025. Three things follow directly. Anything inside the 24-hour service window is free — so design reminders to invite a reply and keep the window open. Utility templates (booking confirmations, reminders) are dramatically cheaper than marketing and get volume-tier discounts; marketing gets none, deliberately. And rates are per country — around US$0.025 in the US, ~£0.038 in the UK, over €0.11 in Germany. Classify every template correctly at design time; it's the difference between cents and dollars per client per year.
Every message this system sends is either a service message (about an appointment they booked) or a marketing message. They are governed differently, and the difference has to be modelled in the database, not remembered by whoever writes the campaign.
STOP replies and opt-out links, promptlyThe Act currently binds organisations turning over more than A$3 million, but reform is expected to extend it to all businesses — build as if it already applies. APP 7 restricts using personal information for direct marketing, and the practical rule bites here: a phone number collected to confirm an appointment generally cannot be repurposed for promotions unless the client was told that at collection. So the booking form has to capture purpose and consent at the moment the number arrives.
Design consequence
Consent is per channel, per purpose, timestamped, with the wording shown at capture stored alongside it. Bolting this onto an existing client table later means going back to every client and asking again — which in practice means losing most of your marketable list. Cheap now, expensive forever after.
This table is the Australian pitch. A five-chair salon on Timely pays roughly A$230 a month, forever, and never owns a row of the data.
| Platform | Monthly | Commission | 5-chair salon | Owns the data? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fresha | ~A$49 inc GST | 20% of new marketplace clients | A$49 + commission | Fresha does |
| Timely | ~A$46 per staff | None | ~A$230 | Timely does |
| Phorest | Quote only | None | Quote only | Phorest does |
| Yours, self-hosted | VPS + messages | None | ~A$40–70 all-in | The salon does |
Two things to be honest with yourself about. First, Fresha's 20% buys real demand — its marketplace sends new clients that a self-hosted system will not. Your answer has to be Reserve with Google plus the Business Profile, and you should say so plainly rather than pretending the marketplace has no value. Second, self-hosted isn't free: you become the support line and the on-call. Price the recurring fee for that reality, not for the server bill.
Scope discipline is what gets Mum's salon live. Everything here is defensible later and a mistake now.
The shortest path from here
Ship Tier 0 complete for Mum's salon on WhatsApp and Mercado Pago. Add deposits, waitlist fill, and rebooking prompts — the three Tier 1 items with the clearest payback. Then build the owner dashboard, because that's the screen you'll open first in every Australian sales meeting, and it needs six months of real data behind it to be worth showing.